[Balatro] So I'll tell you all the story about the Poker and the rougelike

aioua

joshofalltrades wrote: »

I was trying to unlock the final deck (beat Orange Stake difficulty) with the black deck and just could not do it.

Two tries on the checkered deck and Bob’s your uncle.

Pretty sure the black deck is incredibly undertuned. It probably needs to have the downside of -1 hand removed.

Or maybe have it start with the basic +4 joker already in play.

It just really struggles early game since you can't take advantage of its upside for quite a while.

DarkPrimus

It doesn't seem to matter how silly the combos I manage to put together feel, I cannot manage to break the 1,000,000 chips in a single hand barrier, nor get past Ante 11.

Knight

i got the 1 mil earlier with the planet cards is xmult and adding cards is xmult, but i also got buzzsawed on ante 11. its very rough.

The Zombie Penguin

DarkPrimus wrote: »

It doesn't seem to matter how silly the combos I manage to put together feel, I cannot manage to break the 1,000,000 chips in a single hand barrier, nor get past Ante 11.

1 mil hand is fairly diffuclt to get going, annoingly because one of the best cards for it - Stuntman - is locked behind... a 1 mil hand.

Generally thoguh, the way to pull it off is to have a good chip card (The Bull, Square Joker, Stuntman), a good raw multi card (Ride the Bus, Green Joker, Mystic Joker, Supernova - anything that can get past 30+ mult), and a bunch of X multi sources. Collector/Baseball or whatever he's called is really good, as it's 1.5x per uncommon joker you have, which then triggers sequetially - So your 30x mult becomes 45, becomes 67.5, becomes 101.25... etc.

Stuff like Baron with Mime, Red Seal, Steel Kings can also got absolutely nuts because of said multiplier stacking

cooljammer00

Beat a run with Yellow Deck. Got the spectral card that generates a rare card but takes all your money, but I only had 3 dollars anyway and it generated Blueprint which copies the effect of the card to the right. To the right was that card that gives you more xMult the more blinds you skip so I ended up having multiple multiples. I also had (add times hand played to mult) and some other stuff that really helped.

Edit: I think I also had that joker that generates jokers for every round, and then the joker that gets more powerful when you sell jokers. So if the joker was good, I kept it, but if the joker was bad, I sold it and got more powerful.

surfpossum

Gnizmo wrote: »

This is officially the stupidest thing I have managed to accomplish. It was using the Plasma deck so I only really needed to boost one side.

I just had a run like this except instead of the triple Wee Joker (what?) I had Hanging Chad and... something else that was giving a flat amount of chips, I think

Plasma deck feels very easy to grind wins out with since a single foil joker will get you through the first couple antes on its own, at least up to whatever I'm on (purple stake?)

Corporal Carl wrote: »

It could've been that you got Eris in a challenge, but challenges don't unlock anything?

I've set my personal largest hand record:

It was done with the Plasma deck on White difficulty with the following degenerate combination of jokers:

It was the "Pairs give you chips" joker who had +30 chips on itself (I am playing on console).
Scary face gives +30 chips per face card.
Triboulet gives each King and Queen x2 Mult.
The two-face joker retriggers all played face hands.
Vagabond gives a Tarot card when you are at $3 or lower.

I first got Vagabond, and then on the next blind there was a "Get cards and boosters free", so I skipped that one and it had a Spectral pack and the two-face card.
Spectral gave me the legendary joker, and with a millisecond the two-face joker was bought.
Scary face is a common joker so I met that one pretty quickly.
"Pairs give you chips" is also common, and pretty neat for scoring some extra chips.

I had been playing High Cards to get Vagabond Tarot cards, which allowed me to modify my deck considerably; in the end over 80% of my deck was Kings and Queens, all with the +10 chips enhancement.
As a resulted I migrated from Flush to Flush House to Flush Five.
Because this was the Plasma deck, I decided to consider chip enhancements more important than mult enhancements, and it worked.

It was a very fun run, and actually mainly because I managed to transform my deck extremely. The insane mults and big numbers were an extra.

And cooljammer00 , congratulations on your first beaten run! I hope you've unlocked a few new jokers by doing that.

Baseball joker is very powerful, and can make you pivot towards going for uncommon jokers. But remember to have either a really good "flat Mult" generator (like your Supernova), or have your favourite hand combination upgraded a lot via Planet cards

I don't understand how this hits a billion; it seems like the jokers here plus a hand full of bonused kings would be ~800 chips, plus whatever your actual hand is worth and then the 32xmult from Triboulet

A lvl 1 flush five would be like... still under 1k x 1k, if I'm doing my math right, which is a loooong way from 33k x 33k for a billion

What am I missing/messing up

The Zombie Penguin

So mad earlier with Plasma deck. Finish teh first blind, in the shop: Foil Stuntman!

I had seven bucks, and it cost 8. WHY CRUEL GAME WHY

The Zombie Penguin

SEND HELP

The Zombie Penguin

The deck sadly died on Ante 10 (that was actually Ante 12 technically) due to a rogue The Plant.

Which was sort of bad when 41 of the 73 card deck were Queens, and most of those were Red Seal Steel Queens. Alas!

aioua

I've had two spectacular blunders in the last couple of days both with the legendary that gives kings/queens 2x mult.

The first, i had managed to get THREE copies of the legendary and a blueprint. 5-of hands were pushing north of 10 billion depending on the card enhancements. I didn't have the reroll voucher yet so my fith joker was that disable bosses one. This setup got me to unlock Stuntman, which then suddenly appeared in the shop as a polychrome. I foolishly rolled the dice and the next boss was face cards debuffed. Over on ante 12.

Next, similar set up but i only have one of the K/Q legendary with a blueprint and brainstorm. Not rolling quite as high but i also pick up the legendary that clones your consumables. With a strength and death getting cloned i start to convert my entire deck into queens.

I also have the Observatory voucher so once i get my deck set up my plan is to switch over to copying the right planet card over and over and really sent my score to the moon.

A couple rounds into ante 10 i realize i can swap the two legendaries to get 3x consumables then swap it back again. Nice, doing this gets my deck nearly complete with a ton of clones of a polychrome queen.

Come up against the "can only play one hand type" boss, don't think anything of it, every hand wins I'm still on like ante 11. Play my hand, pitiful score. Oops, i forgot to swap the legendaries back. It's ok i have more hands expect...
First hand was flush five instead of 5ofKind. My queens are pretty well mixed in suit and despise my desperate last few draws i can't get another flush five together.

Just

Fucking

Tragic

Gnizmo

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

It's a double penalty that's non obvious, both which hit you in the most difficult portion of the game.

The actual upside is whatever, an extra joker slot is very powerful but only kicks in late game, and you have a lot of trouble getting there with a crippled economy.

Especially since it can be tricky to get that many Jokers to meaningfully contribute as at times. Especially at higher difficulties. My gag run of 12 Jokers was funny, but very few of the negative Jokers were handy. So having an extra "Well it beats an empty slot" Joker just doesn't help a ton. At least in my experience.

DarkPrimus wrote: »

It doesn't seem to matter how silly the combos I manage to put together feel, I cannot manage to break the 1,000,000 chips in a single hand barrier, nor get past Ante 11.

I got it with the Checkered deck by going hard on hearts, and getting that Joker with the increased probability. It gets especially fun if you can get the voucher that lets you get Jupiter every time. Still takes work, but spamming cards is buying a bunch of extra chips and +multi Jokers without taking up a slot. Of course that requires getting those things in the first place.

discrider

I'm pretty sure I got 1 mil with Ancient Joker/Fibonacci/Hack, heavily taroting the deck with +Mult/+chips and no high cards.
Easier with that deck with no face cards, and with smeared joker, but I'm pretty sure it was just with red deck?

surfpossum

So close 😭



Missed the big blind on Ante 9 by a hair, but at least it got me my first orange blind win first (Bull on Plasma deck with infinite money is good)

The Zombie Penguin

I'm a bit baffled by how you did that, but I'm also impressed and so is the devil

Tofystedeth

Midas + paradolia?

surfpossum

Pareidolia plus Splash plus Midas Mask means every card you play becomes gold

And then Business Card to make a bit of money while making money

aioua

Surfpossum wrote: »

Pareidolia plus Splash plus Midas Mask means every card you play becomes gold

And then Business Card to make a bit of money while making money

Midas works on non-scoring cards so you don't even need splash.

surfpossum

Aioua wrote: »

Surfpossum wrote: »

Pareidolia plus Splash plus Midas Mask means every card you play becomes gold

And then Business Card to make a bit of money while making money

Midas works on non-scoring cards so you don't even need splash.

Good to know

I had gotten Business Card first so Splash was generating a lot of returns off of that already

I think Splash is one of my favorites, it enables so many things

The Zombie Penguin

Another deck that's shockingly hard to get off the ground: Zodiac Deck. Turns out having a much decreased chance to see jokers from the word go sucks!

Tofystedeth

Finally unlocked plasma desk. When it says it balances chips and mult that means like, equally? So that makes +chips stuff super good then, because most of time chips bonuses are bigger.

aioua

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Finally unlocked plasma desk. When it says it balances chips and mult that means like, equally? So that makes +chips stuff super good then, because most of time chips bonuses are bigger.

Yup.

Though because chip bonuses are always + and not x if you want to go endless you have to pivot to mult at some point.

discrider

Surfpossum wrote: »

Aioua wrote: »

Surfpossum wrote: »

Pareidolia plus Splash plus Midas Mask means every card you play becomes gold

And then Business Card to make a bit of money while making money

Midas works on non-scoring cards so you don't even need splash.

Good to know

I had gotten Business Card first so Splash was generating a lot of returns off of that already

I think Splash is one of my favorites, it enables so many things

???
I don't think I've ever picked up Splash over any other Joker.
I can't think when it would be worth it aside edge cases like the above, and then only until I curate my deck and force everything gold.

Tofystedeth

It's helpful if you have a build going dependant on small hands like high cards or pairs, and jokers that scale based on cards scored in conjunction with that. But i generally end up dropping it later on.

Tofystedeth

Aioua wrote: »

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Finally unlocked plasma desk. When it says it balances chips and mult that means like, equally? So that makes +chips stuff super good then, because most of time chips bonuses are bigger.

Yup.

Though because chip bonuses are always + and not x if you want to go endless you have to pivot to mult at some point.

Hmmm looks like it applies xMult before it does the balancing so you'd have to go really hard into to match some of the available chip bonuses.
Edit:, though in fairness if it happened after it would make the deck OP than it already feels like

cooljammer00

I like Splash with that one that adds double your lowest card to the mult, because I'll play my hand and then either add a high card or add a low card and have the mult added. It helps.

joshofalltrades

discrider wrote: »

Surfpossum wrote: »

Aioua wrote: »

Surfpossum wrote: »

Pareidolia plus Splash plus Midas Mask means every card you play becomes gold

And then Business Card to make a bit of money while making money

Midas works on non-scoring cards so you don't even need splash.

Good to know

I had gotten Business Card first so Splash was generating a lot of returns off of that already

I think Splash is one of my favorites, it enables so many things

???
I don't think I've ever picked up Splash over any other Joker.
I can't think when it would be worth it aside edge cases like the above, and then only until I curate my deck and force everything gold.

So just one example that springs to mind, that I've used pretty recently

The Joker that gives you x3 mult if you have a scoring card from each suit obviously only works on hands that score 4 or 5 cards

So if you've been focused on pairs or three of a kind or whatever, picking up splash lets you keep doing the hands your deck is built for while also giving you a x3 mult

It's not, like, a meta strategy or anything, but there are lots of non-edge cases where it comes in handy

You can add bonus/mult/glass cards to hands that wouldn't ordinarily score them, for another example

Or if you have a build where every card counts as a face card and your face cards are adding mult/chips, suddenly you're always getting those bonuses on 5 cards instead of however many you manage to score in a hand

It's pretty useful to be able to always score 5 cards

discrider

...
Why are people building around high card or pair?

Satsumomo

discrider wrote: »

...
Why are people building around high card or pair?

Quick example, you have a whole lot of steel cards, so it's best you have many of them in your hand when you play.

aioua

discrider wrote: »

...
Why are people building around high card or pair?

You can get some good builds going that way!

Esp if you have something like burned joker to bump up the level of the hand.

But like, if you have scaling +chips and +mult jokers then dedicate the rest to xmult then the hand you pay kind of stops mattering.

discrider

I guess there's also the stone deck/stone joker that I've not seen/played before.

The Zombie Penguin

In general some of the most powerful decks are "ignore hand, score from joker" since they just laugh at stuff like every card being debuffed, and are otherwise very resilient.

If you can get them rolling, decks that use Burned Joker + Square Joker quickly go nuts on score. Just gotta get past the initial hump

discrider

I mean, I would, but the Plant is staring me down in this eternal everything-is-face challenge, and my +chips on face card is polychrome (x1.5 Mult).
So I had to skip on square joker, but trips are now at level 7, so hoping I can juice them past the plant?

Edit: haha, 20K debuffed trips against a 40K boss blind. Eat it, plant.

Peewi

I ran into something odd.

I had a negative Invisible Joker and when I sold it, it put me at 1 joker above my limit. On its own that's not that weird and works in favor of the player.

Later I encountered Stencil Joker in the shop and it was listed as X-1.


Now I'm curious if it's actually possible to get a negative multiplier.

Noggin

discrider wrote: »

...
Why are people building around high card or pair?

Not to dogpile, but I just got this game yesterday and my first win was because I got "+8 mult if played hand contains a Pair", and dumping some planets into it carried me for a long time.

That ended up being a really cool card, because stuff like a K, Q, 9, 9, 5 flush "contained" a pair.

discrider

Yeah, I'm tending to just go two pair/straight/flush from the outset though, and curate the deck through tarot into the later rounds to sustain.

surfpossum

Plasma deck warps everything but yeah before using that I was pretty frequently going for high card

Scaling jokers can make your actual hand basically irrelevant, and if all you care about is your high card you essentially get a free discard with every hand you play

Tofystedeth

Peewi wrote: »

I ran into something odd.

I had a negative Invisible Joker and when I sold it, it put me at 1 joker above my limit. On its own that's not that weird and works in favor of the player.

Later I encountered Stencil Joker in the shop and it was listed as X-1.


Now I'm curious if it's actually possible to get a negative multiplier.

Hmmm easiest might be if you can get that joker that gets +1 per hand played and -1 per discard. If that can go negative that might be the most straightforward. That or if you could somehow not eat the popcorn.

Noggin

2nd win, 1st with blue, powered by jokers that made half my packs give tarot cards… tarot cards give +mult… and +mult for hands containing three of a kind… then using like 40 tarot cards to end up with a deck that constantly allowed ranked up Full Houses.

This game is absolutely wild. So fun.

Mvrck

Bad draws on my final Big Blind tonight with a Zodiac Deck. I could have taken the Boss Blind too, had a higher hand on the Small Blind than the Boss was asking for.

I got an Ante 2 Small Blind Mega Spectral that combo'd into a load of Queen of Hearts, and also got early shop cost reduction vouchers.

Then I high rolled Blueprint + Constellation around Ante 4 and was off to the races. Just spammed buying $2 and then later $1 planets from the shop all game long. Finished with 10.1x Multiplier on Constellation, but sadly went out at the 450m Big Blind because I couldn't get my glass cards to line up. In retrospect, I probably should have burned some hands drawing to them for one giant swing instead of doing one or two per hand for "only" 100 million a pop. Lesson learned for the future.

But hey, finally got over that Ante 11 hump I had been hitting.

Slym

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Peewi wrote: »

I ran into something odd.

I had a negative Invisible Joker and when I sold it, it put me at 1 joker above my limit. On its own that's not that weird and works in favor of the player.

Later I encountered Stencil Joker in the shop and it was listed as X-1.


Now I'm curious if it's actually possible to get a negative multiplier.

Hmmm easiest might be if you can get that joker that gets +1 per hand played and -1 per discard. If that can go negative that might be the most straightforward. That or if you could somehow not eat the popcorn.

that joker cannot go into negative mult, (un?)fortunately